Qualtrics

If a traveler has an easy time booking her flight but it gets canceled and she isn't able to reschedule it effectively, then the overall experience is bad. Situations like this are why organizations need to focus on a person's end-to-end journey, not just individual interactions.

Journey mapping is a valuable tool for creating this perspective. A good journey map has multiple pieces.

First, it identifies a specific target audience. Since different people have different needs and perceptions, it's critical to start with a deep understanding of whose journey you're examining.

For instance, the journey of a business traveler is quite different from a parent on a family vacation. Design personas can be very useful in capturing and disseminating this information.

Second, a good journey map specifies the goal of the target audience. A vacationer may be flying to embark on a cruise or to spend a week with family.

Each of those goals will drive a very different set of needs and expectations. Third, it identifies the steps the target audience goes through to accomplish their goal.

This isn't a list of things that the company is doing, instead it completely focuses on how the targeted audience views the journey, which means many of the steps may not even include your organization. For instance, a vacationer's journey may include sharing itineraries with friends and booking excursions.

Finally, a good journey map identifies people's perceptions all along the journey. Which steps are working, which ones are broken, and where there are key emotional moments that disproportionately shape their attitudes.

Journey maps are valuable for examining customer and employee experiences, finding and fixing critical problems, designing innovative experiences targeting insights and metrics at the right moments and instilling XM-centric mindsets across your organization. For more information about experience management, visit xminstitute.com.